Dear OpenStreetMap Community and fellow mappers,

After writing to you in 2022 and 2023, you could think that these chairman reports would become pretty routine: compare a few numbers over time, tout the accomplishments of the OSMF board this year, and give a few paths for the coming year. I will be doing this, but in contrast to previous years, we do not have many positive changes to report on, because of the way the board has been (not) working. I will expand on why later, and talk about how I think the board should refocus in 2025. What might sound like board internal politics is actually, I think, at the core of how we organise as a project. This hasn’t been an easy report to write, which is why it comes so late.

We have 2088 members today, down from 2161 in December 2023, compared with about 2000 in December 2022. 1125 members today are associated members, and the 2024 membership campaign led by Arnalie at least helped diversify our membership’s geographic diversity. The next board should budget for changes to the website to recognise membership, and encourage qualifying mappers to join for an associate membership. It should also rethink the current complex membership structure, and look at technical improvements to the membership system.

We were happy to welcome Regrid, QGIS and Calimoto as silver corporate members in 2024.

Our number of registered users went down to 9851706 from 10.5 million as OWG cleaned up thousands of spam accounts. The number of nodes, ways and relations in the database keeps increasing at a normal rate, showing our growth and demonstrating how contributing to OpenStreetMap is important to many.

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Dear OpenStreetMap Community and fellow mappers,

As we say goodbye to 2023, I reflect on a year of growth and development in the OpenStreetMap project.

This year has seen substantial increases across various metrics:

• Nodes: Increase of 731,936,003 since last year (9.09% annual increase, over 2 million daily)
• Ways: Increase of 83,077,150 (9.21% annual increase, over 200 thousand daily)
• Relations: Increase of 1,183,690 (11.37% annual increase, over 3,000 daily)
• Registered users: Increase of 1,161,850 (12.25% annual increase, over 3,000 daily)

These statistics, accessible here and here, not only quantify our growth but also demonstrate the dynamic evolution of our project.

Beyond these numbers, the real essence of OpenStreetMap lies in its community. The launch of our new community discourse has fostered more vibrant and quality discussions than ever before, thanks to the dedicated efforts of our moderation teams in maintaining a constructive and respectful environment. The migration of all old forum content was a major effort by the Operations Working Group.

The board, in collaboration with the communications working group, has enhanced transparency and engagement through more frequent blogging, and community consultations on major projects. We also updated our mission statement to better reflect the OSMF’s actual work.

Since late 2020, successive boards have been shaping the OSMF’s first strategic plan, informed by extensive feedback from OSMF members and the broader community. This plan, finalised in September, provides a clear direction on future endeavours in key areas like technical infrastructure, community development, institutional development, and financial governance.

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Dear OpenStreetMap Community, fellow mappers

It is my pleasure to present the annual report of the OpenStreetMap Foundation for the year 2022.

First and foremost, we have been thrilled to welcome Grant, our first employee. He has joined the OpenStreetMap Foundation as our senior SRE after many years of volunteering on the Operations Working Group, and we believe that his expertise and experience is a valuable asset to the OpenStreetMap Foundation. We now finally have someone with the both the time and experience to tackle the big infrastructure projects that will lead us to increased resiliency and stability.

If you would like to learn more about Grant and his work, you can listen to an interview with him on the geomob podcast.

The growth of the OpenStreetMap project isn’t slowing down. We recently passed 8 billion nodes, 900 million ways and 10 million relations. We will reach 10 million registered users in 2023.

As the OpenStreetMap project continues to grow, the workload for the Foundation’s volunteer board members has also increased. While we are thrilled to see the project’s success, it is important to acknowledge that this growth also comes with its challenges. In particular, the increased workload can be overwhelming at times, and it is not always easy or fun. This year has, counterintuively, been marked by a relative lack of activity from the Foundation’s board members. While this is not new or unique to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, several of our board members have experienced burnout and have taken a step back from their roles. The burden of board work can be heavy - you join because you think maps are fun, and you end up spending your free time knee-deep in finance, HR and legal matters.

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The New York Times has maps tracking the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I wondered what the data source of the first one was: were they maybe using OSM?

Mappers on the #openstreetmap IRC channel quickly found some differences. Just to be absolutely sure, I used the QuickOSM plugin for QGIS to download OSM data for the area from overpass. I then quickly styled the map, using the colour picker to copy the Times map. In half an hour, I had my own map of Kharkiv.

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The trumpeting calls of the common cranes on their migratory flights high above Luxembourg announce autumn in September and spring in February. We look up, and for a few seconds, their V-shaped patterns peacefully mark the natural passage of time.

I live an ocean away in New York now. The colder winters last longer. When I hear about construction at home, or maybe feel a bit homesick, I turn to mapping.

Local citizen initiatives have been using OpenStreetMap’s pedestrian crossings to crowdsource data on crossings with parking spots built too close. I have been improving crossings to help out, manually going through points marked as can’t see in ZUG’s analysis. For this crossing, too recent for aerial imagery, a friend sent photos from the ground. I compared the aerial images from previous years to compare how construction had changed the area, and spotted cranes announcing the end of winter in February 2019.

The raw results of the 2021 OSMF Community Survey have now been posted. One of the questions asked people to rank seven choices for what the board should work on:

In 2021, what do you think should be the priority order of tasks the Board of Directors has set for itself?  Please rank the tasks in order of relative importance to the OSM project.

A vote counting method that’s relatively easy to implement in a spreadsheet on a Sunday evening is the [Borda count]. I’ve done a slightly modified one - an option at first rank gets 7 points, second rank 6 points, etc., until 7th rank gets one point.

The results actually match the results if you rank by first preference. Fund-raising gets high ranks in subsequent preferences, but because it’s not high in the first preference, it ends up in the middle of the final count.

Choice	Borda score
Stability of the core infrastructure (hardware, software, human capital)	16591
Takeover protection	11179
Outreach to Local Chapters and Communities	9799
Fund-raising	9529
Attribution guidelines	8307
Recruitment for Working Groups	8299
Brexit	4330

Does anyone want to try a Condorcet ranking?

I mostly agree with that list of priorities.

I hope that I find enough free time to work on hiring our Senior Site Reliability Engineer very soon.

Board members don’t agree on how much a threat takeover is, and how to protect against it - this is definitely something where the members need to make their voices heard. Message me, email the board, post in the comments below.

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Christoph Hormann has recently blogged his 2019 OSMF board candidates analysis and recommendations . I’ve submitted a comment which seems to have become stuck in a spam filter, so here it is again:

Hi Christoph,

Thank you very much for your endorsement! I would like to clarify my position on attribution.

Without any doubt, we should not “[ask] nicely but not do anything of substance.” Attribution, as I write in my answer, is essential. We must make sure that our guidelines are crystal clear about what we expect. Clear and reliable guidelines are good not only for contributors. Reusers need guidelines they can trust to frame how they can use OpenStreetMap, without the risk of upsetting mappers.

Any license, without the potential of enforcement, is nothing but words, and of no strength to secure an open project at all. When the guidelines aren’t met, we do need to be able to go further than ask nicely. The recent action by the board to give FOSSGIS a PoA in one case to enforce attribution is a very positive thing.

100 persons employed by one company joined the OSMF in an orchestrated, directed campaign on 15 Nov, which has been discussed on the [osmf-talk] mailing list and elsewhere.

The Membership Working Group’s investigation has uncovered evidence that the company behind the campaign, GlobalLogic, is not being truthful, and that the members did not sign up individually. GlobalLogic has provided versions of the event that are contradictory and not credible.

We do not know the motivations for this campaign, but strongly suspect that this was an attempt, luckily unsuccessful, to influence the recent OSMF board election.

Our intensive research took two main investigators more than a month, with the precious help of many in the community. On 2018-12-26 we presented our detailed report to the OSMF board. We are now releasing it to the membership.

Some key points of the investigation are the fortuitous French control group (p. 7 and onwards) and the lowercase anomaly (p. 14).

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As we approach the 2018 OSMF general assembly, I am extremely thankful for the support and endorsements that I have received from mappers.

Peter Barth, who is retiring from the board, has said some very nice things about me on the German Radio OSM podcast, chapter 32.

Christian Quest, cofounder and speaker of OpenStreetMap France, has endorsed me in a blog post:

The absence of conflict of interest and a good knowledge of the community in its diversity seem to me to be the main criteria.

Richard Fairhurst, former OSMF board member and father of the Potlatch editor and cycle.travel, has tweeted some of the nicest things about me:

I hope [Guillaume Rischard] is elected: smart, grounded, widely experienced and with a real sense of OSM’s potential, he’d be a great asset to the board and to the project in general.

I’m delighted to see the likes and retweets that this received from other mappers too.

You don’t expect candidates to endorse another, but that’s what Jo Walsh tweeted:

I’m impressed with the amount you’re doing for OSM behind the scenes and hope you get elected, as grassroots members would trust the Board more if you were on it.

Then there are all the wonderful private messages of support and encouragement. Thank all of you.

Thank you to all the OSMF members – the fact that we’re 1041 voters this year shows how many care about the OSMF. Thank you to my fellow candidates, for your time investment, for the positive campaign and for the spirit of comradeship I have felt with you.

510 people have already cast their ballot. If you haven’t yet, you have less than 24 hours to do so. The last election was decided on 19 votes, so your vote matters! Please vote, encourage OSMF members around you to vote. A high turnout will make the community stronger and the OSMF more resilient.

If you haven’t chosen for whom to vote yet, here are my answers to the official questions and manifesto.

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The OpenStreetMap project is organized on an international level by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, under British law.

Some companies are paying employees to join, and there are rumors that they give voting instructions.

In recent years, the Board has gradually lost its balance. Over-representation of some areas and groups makes it difficult to maintain a balanced and diversity of government action and raises some conflict of interest issues. Therefore, it is important that all kinds of mappers join in to balance things out.

On December 15 there are board elections, and everyone who was a member before November 15 can vote.

489 ballots were cast during the last election. By way of comparison, in the last few days, 17 employees from a single US company have joined. This might not be anything sinister, but it’s worrying especially shortly before the board election, and getting the largest amount of OSMF members is the best safeguard of balance.

https://join.osmfoundation.org/normal-membership is the form. It costs £15 (about €17 or $20), it takes 4 minutes, it’s important and it’s too late in 24 hours. I am a candidate for the board election, but of course you distribute your votes however you want.

It is the youngest capital in Europe, a city where years of peace have brought constant street name changes and endless new streets being built. Locals often use landmarks – sometimes long gone – or old or colloquial names when giving directions, which I had to ask for repeatedly on my first trip to Kosovo in May to visit Anne. It’s a cliché to talk of Kosovo’s potential, but it felt especially true when I looked at the map of Pristina, trying to find my way from Bill Klinton Boulevard, which has a huge statue of him, to Rruga B, which has changed to a name no one remembers or uses.

Big proprietary map makers can’t and don’t care to keep up. Even more than elsewhere, the best map of Kosovo can only come from local mappers.

On my next visit, together with the wonderful OpenStreetMap community, I organised a meetup. This led to very productive meetings with Kosovo’s national cadastre agency. I’ll hopefully have more to write about open geographical data in Kosovo soon.

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Our new organised editing guidelines, as the DWG is now calling them, are on the agenda of the next OSMF board meeting.

I will attend it to present our guidelines and answer questions. In the meanwhile, here is my report. I’m also happy to answer any comments below.

We at the DWG are, first of all, thankful for all the constructive input we have received, from the advisory board, the humanitarian mapping initiatives and the mapping community.

This version of the organised editing guidelines took a lot of work to prepare. We have received and integrated a lot of feedback to reflect consensus and existing good practice.

We have looked at what similar policies would exist, on OSM or in other organisations. I believe that no other project, open or proprietary, has faced this exact issue before. On OSM, contributors generally understand the current policies on automated edits and imports. We have written the organised editing guidelines in a similar way, while adopting a slightly softer approach – not following the organised editing guidelines isn’t an offence per se. Elsewhere, Wikipedia has numerous policies some vaguely similar, but the problems they face are quite different, and their policies tend to be a lot more complex.

Internally, we have looked back at past problematic edits. We have carefully written the guidelines and defined the scope to prevent those problems without creating loopholes or negative incentives like encouraging salami tactics. They are not meant to apply to community activities like mapping parties between friends or making a presentation on OSM at a local club, but only to ‘sizeable, substantial’ activities. We want something that doesn’t scare casual events off while letting us regulate a geography class gone berserk or a misguided volunteer mapathon.

We also don’t want to set hard limits in stone since they would have to go back to the Board constantly if we need to refine exactly what falls under the guidelines.

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Inspired by Jochen Topf’s old style multipolygon writing, I have just finished manually cleaning up (most? all of?) the remaining old style MPs in Luxembourg.

The process is currently quite tedious. If we want to put old-style multipolygons behind us, we need to make it easier to find them, convert them, maybe even get editors to automatically convert them on the fly when they’re touched. QA tools like Osmose could also possibly make it a one-click JOSM remote fix.

The method I used was downloading a Luxembourg extract, then searching for type:relation type=multipolygon tags:1 in JOSM. I also had -((type:relation tags:1) | (child (type:relation tags:1))) set up as a filter, but didn’t end up using it, because the MPs would disappear as soon as I’d tag them.

For each MP I found, I would zoom to it (3), click on the outer way, alt-click on that way to select the relation, copy tags from previous selection (utilsplugin2, shift-R) from the way to the polygon, click the way again, and delete the redundant tags on the way.

Sometimes, for joined geometries, I had to select the relation by right-clicking on the parent relation in the tags list.

Since most of these old-style relations haven’t been touched for a long time, I also did some drive-by cleanups. In Luxembourg, the old-style MPs were mostly forests.

Did I get all old-style MPs, or only most of them? If there are multipolygons out there on which both the outer way and the relation are tagged, my find pattern didn’t find them. These are possibly the most ambiguous ones, e.g. conflicting tags on outer way and relation, and should be fixed. Has anyone got a good easy way to find them? I tried hasRole:outer -untagged but that found a lot of false positives.